Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) has become a popular transmission method for high-speed wireless radio transmission, due to its potential for low complexity of transmitters and receivers, paired with robustness under severe multi-path conditions. A more detailed discussion on OFDM in found in S. B. Weinstein and P. M. Ebert: Data transmission by frequency-division multiplexing using the discrete Fourier transform. IEEE Trans. Communication Technology, COM-19(5):628-634, October 1971. The wired counterpart, known as discrete multi-tone (DMT) employs similar techniques. The transmitter uses an inverse discrete Fourier transform (IDFT) to generate a multi-carrier signal, and the receiver applies the Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) to demodulate the data.
Integrated radio receivers need a large gain and a low noise figure to achieve a high sensitivity. Clock signals which are present for frequency reference, mixer control, and A/D converter control, as well as harmonics and mixing products of these periodic signals, may couple into some point in the receiver chain and appear as rotating complex exponentials superimposed to the complex baseband receive signal. If the level of such tones becomes too high, they may degrade the receiver sensitivity. The frequencies of such disturbing tones originating from the RF receiver itself are directly related to the clock frequencies occurring in the receiver.
As stated above, unwanted tones superimposed to the received signal may reduce the receiver sensitivity. The safest approach to prevent this problem is to directly avoid the occurrence of such tones. Even the coupling mechanism may be known and a re-spin of the receiver design may be able to reduce the coupling. However, in highly integrated receiver systems the effort to achieve this can be quite high, possibly requiring detailed modelling, design modifications and additional verification.
A general object of the present invention, therefore, is to mitigate such additive disturbing tones in an OFDM baseband receiver, while achieving low implementation complexity.